I’ve done lots of tech projects within the retail energy industry in Texas - this is the right answer.

To expand a little bit:

Retail energy providers (REPs), like NRG, ClearSky, Just Energy, etc. make their money by forecasting the amount of energy that will be needed as far in advance as possible and purchasing that amount from power generators like CenterPoint and marking it up a few cents. The farther out, the cheaper they can get it. I’ve helped build forecasting engines for a few that ingest historical usage data from meters (all meters in Texas are smart meters), weather data, and others to use machine learning to forecast how much individuals will need and aggregate it together to help the energy traders make better informed trade decisions farther out.

If they mess up or an unforeseen event happens and they don’t have enough energy bought for that time segment (forgot the term for a window of time they use), they have to go to the spot market which is where the prices fluctuate and can be many many multitudes higher than the rate the customers are contracted to pay.

In a storm scenario or a freeze, it can be thousands of times more expensive because demand is so high and supply is so limited. This is when REPs go bankrupt if they don’t have the cash on hand.

There are also insurance plans that the REPs pay for that cover very specific conditions for different types of events or outages that can kick in to cover the huge costs they would otherwise incur on their own buying electricity at that spot rate. I’ve known a few that were only able to stay operating because someone a few years prior had bought an insurance policy that covered said weather event.

Griddy died because of the ice storm in Texas a few years ago and the huge costs people incurred. I actually met with their CIO the year prior as part of a technology assessment of their stack. Nice guy.

Edit: also you can largely thank Enron and Rick Perry for deregulating Texas’ energy - which directly led to the terrible “performance” of the Texas grid during the winter storm Uri in 2021. Same for Enron in the constant blackouts in California in the early 2000’s.

Rolling onto a client that uses “O11y” for observability almost gave me permanent damage.

Oh. Oh shit it hurts that reading this made me self-aware of this behavior. It’s one thing to be in this mindset and not be aware of it and it’s another to have it written out in front of you. 🤢

Okay, not entirely educated on female menstruation person here.

Does the period cycle change or is it consistent over time? Like is it about tracking a woman’s pattern and if there’s a change… that’s the flag?

Damn you’re unionized IT? Where are you general located?

Now but what about the possibility that we are only noticing the bad ones and not the convincing ones?

To be fair, it’s probably more about the IT contractors and consulting firms that didn’t implement security policies or configurations correctly on the S3 buckets for the governments they’re working for. The AWS products aren’t opening up things to the public internet without auth. Which I bet most of you knew.

Example: Accenture left a trove of highly sensitive data on public servers (2017)

Even with removing the Christian aspect from this, it’s pretty heavy and a strong point.

I wonder what their plan is to retell the story in 8-12 years from now when people who were effectively left behind on purpose are of voting age.

Lifelong Texan. Fuck it, you have my support. So tired of this.

This is so well written. She communicated what happened and that how it was done was shitty, her eagerness for something new and willingness to stretch into other areas without sounding wow-is-me accidentally, and professionally @‘d people to call them out. 10/10

What are you talking about? I work in cloud and fiber infrastructure - the major players pay for fiber connections and close proximity to their customers.

ISPs have an obligation to their customers to provide a service at the speed their customer is paying for - regardless of what is coming down the pipe.

It’s so insane to think of this being an office perk. Just there for you to use… My office has a kitchen…